R | 1h 38m | Legal-medical Thriller | May 31, 2024
Whistleblowing on Jabs
Merck is one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, generally ranking in the global top five by revenue. It develops and produces vaccines, medicines, and biotherapies. It has multiple popular drugs, or products, including cancer immunotherapy, anti-diabetic medication, and vaccines against chicken pox and HPV.“Protocol 7” is a medical-legal thriller based on the true story of two Merck lab scientists who filed a whistle-blower lawsuit in 2010. They claimed that Merck, the only company licensed by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to peddle a mumps vaccine in the United States, fraudulently tampered with the vaccine-testing lab data (to support the company’s efficacy claim) by adding animal antibodies to human blood samples.
This produced a result showing that the vaccine was 95 percent effective. Honest, accurate tests would have produced a significantly lower success rate. The manipulated results allowed Merck to keep its FDA license and continue manufacturing the vaccine.
Furthermore, this pack of laboratory lies prevented competitors from attempting to come up with their own mumps vaccines, because they couldn’t match the efficacy level Merck had falsely established.
What Goes On
The film kicks off with Dr. Emilio Errani (Eric Roberts)—Merck’s veep for Virus and Cell Biology—berating minions Dr. Alan Stone (Alec Rayme) and David Kirk (Harrison Tipping) for failing to show a 96 percent efficacy rate for Merck’s moneymaker, the MMR (Measles, Mumps, and Rubella) vaccine. He insists on nice-looking ratings, and he’s not going to lose any sleep over how they make that happen.
This ultimatum sets in motion an attempt by Kirk to “prove” efficacy through a variety of “protocols.” The abovementioned falsified result is the titular Protocol 7. The manipulative data- and numbers-skewing takes place in the lab of one Steve Shilling (Josh Murray), who, unlike the boss, does lose sleep over this horrific display of greed. Shilling ultimately blows the whistle.
He tracks down Dr. Adrian Jay (British actor Matthew Marsden), who is speaking at an anti-vaccination conference, and presents him with evidence he’s swiped from Kirk’s Merck files. Dr. Jay has a history of whistle-blowing on the connection between MMR vaccines and autism.
A Lot to Process
A film attempting to clearly convey a massive amount of information, while at the same time telling a dramatic story about it, is necessarily going to suffer from such a weighty ambition.Regardless, while light on the suspense, drama, and poignancy, it is effective in displaying the sheep-like faith that most of our society and institutions put in vaccines. We’re talking about a faith so strong (and so reinforced by Big Pharma’s financial interests) that the mere questioning of the safety and efficacy of vaccines can put a whistleblower’s career and even life in danger.
Director Andy Wakefield, himself a “controversial” doctor, has been branded and punished for his heterodox scientific views, which are today’s equivalent of heresy. “Protocol 7” pulls back the wine-red, velvet curtains on the hidden ministry behind the religion of vaccines and shows them to be—what else?—celebrants and acolytes at the altar of filthy lucre. Again, had this story about Merck’s attempt to cover up their fraud for financial reasons had blockbuster backing, it could have conceivably alerted many to the truth behind the “nothing to see here folks, move along!” narrative we’ve been sold.
Due to the pandemic, the controversy surrounding this issue still rages—a hot topic appearing even in the current American presidential race. “Protocol 7” is an important movie, regardless of the fact that it’s dramatically low-energy, if only for purposes of information gathering. “Protocol 7” has been out for a month. As of this writing, only one critic dared to touch it on Rotten Tomatoes, and she said it was a bad film. Meanwhile, the audience approval rating stands at 96 percent. Enough said.
